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Thursday, October 21, 2010

So remember when I discovered how the laugh from “Situation” ended up in “Macarena”? But I couldn’t locate any of the hundreds of other songs that also use the same sample? The mystery has been solved. Ironically, by posting the piece as I did, with me having given up searching for a list, I arrived at it. I noticed on Google Analytics that someone found my post on the Alison Moyet laugh by searching some terms that I hadn’t thought of, and right there in the second hit was Who Sampled Who, an indisputably awesome database of songs that have been sampled in other songs. So here, then, is a list of songs that use the laughing effect from Yaz’s “Situation.”

A warning: It’s a mixed bag, in the way that a bag mixed with different kinds of shit is still technically a mixed bag. Sad to think that the last post hit the worthwhile samples with Los Del Rios and Samantha Fox. Nonetheless, the laugh can be heard in a not-terrible 1982 Ser & Duff track that’s vaguely Girl Talk-like in its sample craziness. Hear the laugh at the 5:54 mark.

It’s also in Simon Harris’s 1988 track “Bass,” the video for which is at least educational about how weird pop culture got at the cusp of the 90s.

It’s in the 1990 Deee-Lite track “What Is Love?” (and no, it tragically has no relation to the Haddaway song of the same name). Listen for Alison’s laugh about six seconds in.

Some drag queen named Ondina used it in her 1997 song “Summer of Love,” about twelve seconds in. The resulting track sounds remarkably like a spoof song from “Deep House Dish.” I think Bill Hader would play Ondina.

A 1990 atrocity, “Tequila,” by the group Latino Party, features it around 1:47 in. The song sounds like a cross between a jock jam and what an ill-fated Fly Girl would have heard in her head as she fatally overdosed.

And it appears in the 1999 Belgium dance track “Party Time,” which I can only imagine being useful to cults for brainwashing purposes, what with its incessant chanting of “Tonight is party time / It’s party time tonight.”

Despite all this I still like “Situation” and don’t blame it for this parade of horrors. And I think the real take-away here is yet even more proof that the easiest way to arrive at hard-to-find information online is to post what you have and let the information find you. Take that, traditional research.